With the proliferation of network connectivity between users of computer systems, a vast amount of information has become readily available to those users. Indeed, many call recent times the “information age” because of the ease of gaining access to information from homes and businesses throughout the world. As the amount of available information increases, users have become overwhelmed because they simply do not have enough time or sufficient resources to absorb all of that information in any meaningful way.
Accordingly, users have created information filters of various types in an attempt to filter through the large value of information to derive useful information. Some electronic mail receiving programs parse incoming messages and filter out messages based on content or the initiator of the message. Search engines have been created in an attempt to identify relevant web pages on the Internet out of the millions of such pages that exist and the vast numbers of new pages that are created on a daily basis.
These systems all suffer from various drawbacks. To filter based on some characteristic of an electronic mail message, the electronic mail filtering system requires that such attributes be determined beforehand and provided for the filtering. The filtering system then filters every message having designated attributes. That requires identification of those attributes that are to be excluded before being able to create the filter. It is often difficult to determine the proper attributes to be used as the basis for the filtering.
Similarly, in some existing chat rooms, a user may select participants from whom to receive information. Other persons are excluded, even if the information they might provide would be useful to that user and even if the other participants in the chat room find that information to be useful. Such selections are inflexible to changing circumstances and again, like the electronic mail example, require the user to select those participants to include or exclude from the chat room without regard to the substance of the contribution those participants will make.
In other situations, web pages may include a number of links to other web pages. Sometimes these pages may contain hundreds or thousands of links and often new links being added. It may be difficult for a user to find or remember the links that were previously useful the next time the user opens that link directory page with such a large volume of links.
Further, although search engines exist to enable users to locate pages based on key words contained in the page, these engines also suffer from drawbacks. Many pages incorporate a large volume of words so that those pages will provide “hits” to the search engines that include those words. Often the page may contain such words even though the subject matter of the page may have little or nothing to do with the words that are included. Inclusion of words in this manner may render current search engines less useful in identifying pages with information that is likely to be useful to the user.
Other drawbacks also exist with current systems.